Moore’s law has accurately predicted the progress in transistor counts over the last 50 years - Our World in Data

Daily Data InsightsMoore’s law has accurately predicted the progress in transistor counts over the last 50 years

Moore's law was first described in 1965 by Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder of Intel. He observed that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubled every two years.

This trend has continued over the last half century, and Moore’s predictions have remained surprisingly close to reality.

The chart shows data collected by computational scientist Karl Rupp on the number of transistors per microprocessor over the last 50 years. The data is plotted on a logarithmic scale on the vertical axis. The line follows a straight path, indicating stable exponential growth.

The average transistor count per microprocessor in 1971 was 2,308. In 2021, it was 58.2 billion. That's an average doubling time of 2.03 years — extremely close to Moore’s law.

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November 28 The UN projects that Africa’s population will double by 2070 Today, Africa is home to 1.5 billion people. By 2070, the UN expects this number to more than double. Its estimates range from 2.7 billion to 3.7 billion, with the most likely scenario placing the African population around 3.2 billion. This region is where most of the growth in the world population will occur in the next 50 years. Europe’s population is already shrinking, with Asia and Latin America expected to follow from the 2050s onwards. The UN expects North America’s population to grow, although much slower than Africa's. Read more about population growth →

November 27

In these nine African countries, average incomes have more than doubled since 1990

Economic growth is most important for the world's poorest people, and most of the world’s poorest live on the African continent. Are Africa’s economies growing?

The picture is mixed. In some countries, incomes have unfortunately declined in the last decades. This includes Madagascar, Zimbabwe, and Burundi. I have written about this in my brief explainer on extreme poverty.

In today’s Daily Data Insight, I want to focus on the other side: I want to highlight the African countries that are achieving economic growth. Nine of them are shown in the chart above.

In all nine countries, people’s average incomes have more than doubled since 1990.

This made substantial improvements in living standards possible: the share of people in extreme poverty and the rate of child mortality declined in all nine countries.

If you want to know more about the importance of growth and how it can be measured, you could read my article: What is economic growth? And why is it so important? →

November 26 In 2023, PEPFAR provided life-saving therapy against HIV to 20.5 million people The US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, was established in 2003 to fight the global HIV epidemic. Since its launch, PEPFAR has provided millions of people with antiretroviral therapy (ART) worldwide, especially in Africa. The chart shows the number of people who received therapy through PEPFAR in a given year. In 2023, it was 20.5 million people. ART is highly effective: it helps keep people with HIV healthy and reduces the risk of spreading the virus to others, saving more than one million lives each year. But, after months of legislative delay, PEPFAR was recently renewed for only one year, raising concerns about the program's future after March 2025. Explore data on other aid success stories →Continue reading

November 25 Spotting and fixing data issues: how we help improve data quality on and off our publication In today’s Data Insight, we’re sharing a behind-the-scenes look at a part of our work we rarely talk about, but that is crucial in contributing to a more accurate understanding of the world. We work with hundreds of datasets from many different sources. To check their quality, we’ve built in-house tools that flag unusual patterns, helping us spot when something seems off. Even in high-quality datasets, occasional errors can slip through. The chart shows a recent example: after we updated a dataset, we noticed an unexpected spike in one of its time series. Investigating further, we traced the issue back to the data provider and let them know. They reviewed it, confirmed the problem, and corrected the error. Thanks to exchanges like this, several datasets have been improved this year. Improving data quality is always a collaborative effort. We deeply appreciate the work of statisticians and data providers worldwide, who play a critical role in creating and maintaining these datasets. Our role is to help flag issues when we spot them and provide constructive feedback to make the data better for everyone.Continue reading

November 24 The world population grew fast over the last 60 years, but farmers grew fruits and vegetables even faster For almost all of human history, food was scarce for nearly everyone. The reason for this perpetual scarcity was that whenever food production increased, it did not lead to more food per capita but to more people. Food production did not increase per capita. Population pressure ensured that living standards remained only barely above the subsistence level. Economic historians refer to this mechanism as the Malthusian Trap, and if you’d like to know more, you could read my article about it. This changed in the last decades. More and more societies around the world broke out of the Malthusian Trap. We see this in the data as increasing food production in per capita terms. The chart shows that farmers have grown many fruits, vegetables, and nuts faster than the world population has increased. The increase in global agricultural output was crucial for the reduction of hunger and famines that the world achieved in this period. Whether or not we will be able to end hunger globally will depend on whether this increase in food production will continue. Explore global and country-specific data on a wide range of foods in our Food Data Explorer →Continue reading

November 21 Fossil fuels are the biggest source of CO2 emissions in most countries, but there are a few exceptions Around 90% of the world’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions come from fossil fuels and industrial processes such as cement production. The other 10% comes from land use change, primarily carbon released from trees and vegetation due to deforestation. Fossil fuels are also the biggest source of emissions at the national level in most countries across the world. But there are a few exceptions. In the chart, you can see the share of emissions from fossil fuels compared to land use change across a small selection of countries. In the United States, the United Kingdom, and China, fossil fuels dominate. This data comes from the Global Carbon Project. However, in Brazil, land use change plays a much more significant role. This is for two reasons. First, deforestation rates are higher than in most other countries. Second, Brazil has a very clean power grid. Most of its electricity comes from hydropower, with solar and wind also growing quickly. It burns very little coal and gas. Explore data on how emissions compare across the world and by source →Continue reading

November 20 The United States is the world’s largest oil producer The United States is the world’s largest oil producer. The chart shows annual production by country from 1990 to 2023. The US has been the largest producer for the last seven years. Production in the US gradually declined during the 1990s and early 2000s but increased steeply again post-2010 and is now at an all-time high. This data comes from the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy. Explore oil production data for more countries and further back in time →